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Barence writes "Control of the web is up for grabs. Each of the big three computing companies – Microsoft, Apple and Google – has its own radically different vision to promote, as does the world's biggest creative software company, Adobe. And HTML itself is changing, too. This article examines the case for each of the contenders in the war of the web and, with the help of industry experts, assesses which – if any – is most likely to emerge as victor."

Looks to me that the web is falling under the control of DHS. [thehill.com] We all know how much a threat bit-torrent search engines are to national security.

If this would have happened three years ago, Slash would have posted this article three times with 750 comments each talking about how Bush is a tyrant trying to seize and solidify power. Now in 2010, not a peep.

Thanx. That one flew under my radar. Still, it mentions only one site that was taken over. THIS [torrentfreak.com] site contains an update that lists many more that have been taken over. And, NO, it's not TheHill.com.

But back to my original point. Shouldn't there be comparisons to Nazi book burnings or something? I know we would have seen that comparison made three years ago. I wonder what has changed since then.

I think that says more about how many people are reading slashdot. Most of the stories here now have a paltry handful of comments, and what comments there are... are trollish spew in nature. Very very few intelligent discussions here. This is the first time I've posted a comment here in... a LONG time.

Pretty much. I jumped ship to Reddit months ago. Between the perpetual obnoxification of the Slashdot interface, the stupidification of the Slashdot "editors" and their inscrutable logic in approving idiotic stories for the front page, and the hordes of trollish mundanes that have watered down the geek quotient, I hardly bother to check Slashdot anymore. Back when it was CmdrTaco posting cool dork/nerd shit he found on the internet it was pretty fun, but now... meh.

Well, the US government did fund about 99% of its development, mainly through (D)ARPA, the (Defense) Advanced Research Projects Agency. That seems to have worked pretty well. Furthermore, ARPA left most of the development to the academic community, which does a fairly good job of "unprofitable". They were interested in capability, not profits. The military took what they considered useful from what the academics developed, used it to build their own Internet with very few connections to the academic Internet, and left the academics to continue to play with their big, useful toy.

OTOH, since the Internet was commercialized, we see a lot of what we're talking about here: The primary interest of the for-profit world is maximizing their income from the Internet, while minimizing development and support costs. This is why, for example, it has taken so long to get wireless Internet. It has been built by the phone companies, whose interests lie in creating exclusive "walled gardens", in which they have control over what software you are allowed to run, because they want you to pay for every little thing (even when its authors are giving it out free). They also seriously limit independent developers, because they want you to pay the phone companies for the software, not the developers. (Sorta like how the music industry has so successfully claimed 99% of the income, given a small part to the top "artists", and given the rest nothing.)

If history is any guide, we should conclude that strict government control and management of the Internet is the right way to go, at least in countries where the government (or the military;-) has the good sense to continue to view it as an academic playground. And, as ARPA did during the early development, we should restrict the corporate world to the role of suppliers of the components, with no control of what we do with the network.

The growing talk of corporate monopolies running big chunks of the Internet should be a serious warning to all of us. To see why, look at the phone system back when in the US and many other countries, you could only attach hardware purchased or leased from the phone companies to your phone line. For a century, this produced glacially-slow development. Then, in the US and a few other countries, the government changed the rules, and gave customers permission to attach "foreign" gadgets (that met minimum interface requirements) to their phone lines. Within only a few years, there was an explosion of new capabilities. This is what you'd expect when you enable competition, of course. But you can't have competition and development if your connection is controlled by a monopoly that's allowed to control how you can use their system. In the US, this is pretty much the situation with wireless phones right now, and as a result, the wireless Internet is seriously crippled here.

Phrases like "net neutrality" and "control of the Web" should be warnings to all of us that the corporate world is trying to take control and limit our use of the Internet to only what we've explicitly paid them for. Look at the anti-competitive ways that Apple's App Store imposes. Ask yourself whether you want Apple or any of the other big players to impose rules like that on all the independent software developers out there. Ask yourself whether you want one big "winner" to control the Internet like AT&T did the phone system for a century, and block almost all further progress.

This is a case where the classical "incompetence" of the government has worked to our advantage. Maybe we should keep it that way. Without it, we'd never have had the Internet. We'd only have a flock of small, vendor-specific networks. You'd only be able to communicate with people and sites approved of by your

The web will continue to be controlled by the same people that have always controlled it -- us, the users. If a minority interest such as a company or government manages to exert unwanted influence on the web, whether that be a proprietary standard or unpopular laws, then the greater community will simply migrate the web to a new form.

make the intertubes like a public street or flea market where anyone can set up shop or make their opinion known, I do not want any one entity to dominate and control the internet, it needs to be free and neutral and available for anybody.

Continue supporting open source solutions. As long as Unix/Linux OSes remain the dominant systems and Apache the dominant server then proprietary solutions will never win. The attempt of proprietary vendors to win is exactly what drives the community to fork and maintain open source. In the same way that BSD gave birth to FreeBSD, Open Office gave birth to Libre Office. I suspect Oracle will eventually force MySQL to fork in order to remain open but it has the momentum now to remain the dominant web DB. Fre

Um. The title is absurd. You don't "control the web" by adopting open standards. None of these three is "controlling the web." If you want to look for someone controlling the web, look at all the legislation going around allowing governments to seize domain names, and treat traffic differently based on its source, and shut down peoples' access to the web based on mere allegations. That's "controlling the web."

You and I, silly people. Why are we deluding ourselves into believing only massive multinational companies can control the web, or that the government can control the internet, etc.? They are granted power because we give it to them.

If each of you here went over to 10 people's homes and set them up on something like Tor, and showed them how to protect their privacy and avoid malware and advertisement, executives everywhere would be protesting in front of Congress to stop those goddamned citizens from ruining their perfectly profitable business built on exploiting them. That, people, is power. And it is yours, not theirs.

If each of you here went over to 10 people's homes and set them up on something like Tor, and showed them how to protect their privacy and avoid malware and advertisement, executives everywhere would be protesting in front of Congress to stop those goddamned citizens from ruining their perfectly profitable business built on exploiting them.

Yep and then when facebook doesn't work, or youtube is too slow. They will immediately stop everything they were just taught.

Tor is slow. Most people are too lazy to use ad-block or no-script.. that and it makes their web pages not work. Ive had people use my computer to go online real quick and the second facebook doesn't load.. "whats wrong with your computer?"

That's a big if, though. The power structure of the world has and will always be a pyramid, and those on the bottom have always had the strength and numbers to overthrow those above it, yet a look at the past 20 years in Myanmar/Burma and Argentina are enough to show you that people still, after thousands of years, aren't always quick to do it. Something like the Magna Carta only happens so often, but when it does it's glorious. The real power in that document wasn't the power of the peasants or even the nobles to hold the monarchy accountable - after all, we've always had pitchforks - it was the establishment of an early set of bureaucracy. Companies follow rules for profit, the easiest way to win is just to play their game. Net neutrality is a good example of that - use an established bureaucracy against them. It's much easier to effect change as a small group of vocal lobbyists than a massive uprising. The average citizen wants their coffee and paper, to watch the game, and for the kids to behave. A technowhatsit spat over standards is about as boring as John Kerry's stump speech (that joke is six years old already).

You know, people are always reluctant for me to touch their computers and install privacy-enhancing software, until I show them how much faster their computer runs without malware, spyware, and pre-installed garbage. After I strip away all the advertisements they see on the web, they're utterly delighted. They want to buy me dinner, or hug me until I choke. They go from skeptics to supporters in a matter of minutes. And then I explain to them how I did it, and ask them to show their friends.

People come to me all the time now asking for the same services: How do I turn off advertisements on my internet? How to I get rid of all these popups trying to sell me crap? And increasingly, people are asking me how they can browse without the government knowing what they are looking at. See, people do read all this crap on CNN; They just feel powerless to do anything about it.

But once they have a community resource willing to show them, suddenly you've got the most unlikeliest of people knocking at your door. Traditional arguments about power and government hold little weight when I can show people how to push a button and make all the bullsh*t go away. No more tracking. No more advertisements. Bamf. Gone. All of it. They're free to use the public resource that is the internet with a peace of mind and just a smidgeon of anonymity and privacy.

I considered that, for about two minutes. Then I remembered what it was like when Office bought out the ribbon interface, and imagined having to go through three months of "Where's the start menu gone? This is a stupid computer!"

The power structure of the world has and will always be a pyramid, and those on the bottom have always had the strength and numbers to overthrow those above it, yet a look at the past 20 years in Myanmar/Burma and Argentina are enough to show you that people still, after thousands of years, aren't always quick to do it.

Actually, history is full of stories of the people at the top being overthrown by their "inferiors". But those people are human, too, so what they normally do is just step into their predece

You and I, silly people. Why are we deluding ourselves into believing only massive multinational companies can control the web,

You are right that the Web belongs to you and I. And it goes further. TFA asks the question backwards:

Control of this new evolution of the web is up for grabs. Each of the big three computing companies – Microsoft, Apple and Google – has its own radically different vision to promote.

This question is biased. The Web has not been created by corporate entities and is not "up for grabs". The web has evolved out of the cumulative connectedness of public networks through public standards, which development is still overseen by the WWW Consortium. Attempts to privatize parts of it (eg. AOL) have failed and new attempts must fail if we wish to see the Web further innovate.

Sorry to reply to my own post, but to put Microsoft, Apple and Google contentions on the same plane is just wrong. Of these, only Google is purely a Web company, and is also the only one who defends the public standards that have made the Web, and its own existence, possible.

So that whole deal with Apple taking a GPL engine, enhancing it and developing it, and pushing HTML5 and CSS, and striving hard to ensure that Webkit passed the Acid Tests, among other standards compliance...

MS finally pulling its finger out with IE9 development, and decent HTML5 demonstrations, looking like it will at last be on a par with the other browsers for web standards.

That was all just a myth, right?

Google is not the only one promoting the public standards that have made the web.

This shows a profound lack of understanding of how large corporations try to control markets.
The first thing you have to understand is that almost all large companies strive as hard as they can to remove the market from consideration - this is called "marketing" (as with most corp speak, it is newspeak, the opposite of what is intended). The goal of marketing is to make you buy stuff on silly things, like the label, rather then on what you need or what is best cost/price/function.
The second thing is that

It helps that while google's results may be crappy, it's competitors are worse. There are great technological difficulties in making search effective. Google has the best engineers in the industry. Their only serious competitor is Bing, and almost every last percentage point of their market share can be attributed not to the quality of their service, but the advantage they gain from being heavily promoted by Internet Explorer, which in turn remains successful only because of it's bundling with Windows.

Why are we deluding ourselves into believing only massive multinational companies can control the web, or that the government can control the internet, etc.? They are granted power because we give it to them.

This is a myth. If it were true, the actions of the government would reflect the wishes of the majority. But it isn't true:

it is not in fact true that the idea that groups will act in their self-interest follows logically from the premise of rational and self-interested behavior. It does not follow,

Technically yes, more accurately no. Few people would be able to go anywhere online without DNS. Few people at this point go around the net by IP address and trying to do so is difficult as things can and do change and you're not really going to know without a bit of extra effort whether or not that's a legitimate redirect. Having to manually check each one is a pain.

They're shutting down sites that help people infringe on copyright. Why do guys keep defending sites that are breaking the law? What logical progression goes from "shutting down sites that help infringe" to "mandate a government DNS"?

If you want to get technical, the government didn't "seize" anything? They updated a DNS entry. The original site, server, files, equipment, goods, etc. are still in the hands of the owner.

I disagree with the length of copyright and think the industry should make more things av

They may not have seized the servers, but the government effectively DoS'ed them for 90%+ of their users at the behest of the ip cartels without due process. If they can do it to these guys with no repercussions or oversight, they can do it to some sight you do care about.

And what stops them from lying. As there was not any apparent due process, it means that they could say whatever wihtout a strong burden of proof.....when I search for torrents (only legal of course) I use google or bing, why are they any more exempt than torrent-finder.com which doesnt host any torrents, but simply searches sites that do.

Let's be realistic here for a second and stop this bullshit skirting the law defense.

Go to torrent-finder.info and you'll see "high speed download" links for copyright infringing works. The "popular tags" all look like copyright infringing works. It is very obvious that they exist only to help people infringe on copyrights and make advertising money off of it.

While you may be able to do something similar with Google, but that is not the primary reason they exist.

And that's exactly why they can't shut down the bittorrent protocol or games and operating systems from distributing via bittorrent. That's why you don't see linuxtracker.org (for example) on the list of sites.

It's obvious that while the blocked sites encourage using a legal protocol, their primary function is to encourage it's use for copyright infringement.

If you want to get technical, the government didn't "seize" anything? They updated a DNS entry. The original site, server, files, equipment, goods, etc. are still in the hands of the owner.

That sounds a bit strange for someone defending IP[copyright] rights.I mean, just how do you propose they seize a website? Smash in and grab the servers, etc.?That only works when the servers are in your area of jurisdiction. To do that in the ontopic case, we would have to invade another country to seize the servers.In this case, we updated the DNS entry t

Most comments have not been in defense of copyright infringement, but opposed to lack of due process.

What exactly is due process when most of the organization exists outside of your jurisdiction? We can't arrest the owner or serve him to appear in US court. Yet, his actions are allowing US citizens to violate copyright laws. The only thing we have jurisdiction over is the.com DNS resolution, right?

So is not due process getting a court order and serving it to those in the US controlling DNS resolution for t

To be fair, it's been sliding for a while. Just compensation in my view shouldn't allow for the government to condemn property and pay peanuts for it. Doesn't strike mas as particularly just. Yes, under certain circumstances the government does need certain specific property for things like building bridges or roads, but paying anything other than the assessed value doesn't strike me as particularly just.

You think those amendments really count anymore? I got stopped by a drunk driving checkpoint without any probable cause beyond "he was in a vehicle." Eminent domain lets them take whatever they want, especially in light of the latest ruling on it, for any purpose. Just compensation is whatever the government says it is.

Who will win control of the Web? I will. In fact, I already have it, and have had it since some time in the 1990s. And if some entity somehow takes that control away from me, I or one of my many fellow producers of web content will create a new Web, and we will use that.

The web should be renamed the ebb for ebb and flow.Right now, Facebook is taking over the web.Soon, people will realize Facebook is just AOL without the free coasters.It will be on to the next BIG thing.

Could you and the GP explain what it is about Facebook that makes you so angry when others use it? Do you think that given an opportunity, you would bar citizens from accessing Facebook, possibly because you look down on them or think it is for their own good? Keep in mind no one is making YOU use Facebook; I am inquiring about your anger at others' usage.

The web is the opiate of the masses. Control be by the firm that has customers, as they will be able to set the standards. MS set the standard for desktop and the mid web because they has the users and could deliver those user as customers to other firms.

Almost no one really knows how to use a computer. Almost no one knows how to create a domain name and create content, even using one click installs of pre fab websites. Most people do not want to learn. MS is losing market share because most firms do

Whoever delivers the machines the average user need to access the web will define the way that the web pages are developed. Be it HTML 5, Flash, with a WIMP or more likely touch interface.

I keep hoping someone will notice that HTTP is not the only Internet protocol in existence!

HTML has been stretched way beyond its original intent - to deliver static, stateless text-based documents. In the mad rush to push multimedia onto the net, someone decided that the Web browser is the proper platform for delivery

The idea that the web will not be under gov't or corp control is silly, because the web is 50% hardware - billions of dollars of fiber optic and cisco routers and servers, and someone
has to pay for that stuff
and he who pays, rules.
Seriously, if yo have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in fiber optic cable, are you going to do anything that in any way interferes with your ability to make as much as possible ?
given the avg intelligence level of corp c suite excecs, that means many companies will t

This is a numbers game. I would say that English speaking countries have an advantage, especially including India. However, most of them are 'democratic', which in this case means they agree to disagree. China is motivated, focused, and very structured. They have been effective in controlling the web within China and have started exporting that expertise globally. Most corporations want to have a stricter version of their Great Wall.

It's too late to ask this question. Google beat everyone in this game. Wait 5-10 years if you would like to see a new entity "own" the web.
Yes I understand no one owns it and I agree, but based on the premise of the article, it's as if Google was in a war against its competitors in traffic control. The new "rivals" lost years ago. They can't suddenly "win". Something new is needed and it will take a long time for that to happen. Period!

Why are users so stupid as to hand control of the web over to *anybody*? Why are they so keen to support proprietary protocols, closed ecosystems, and single-vendor grabs for power?

Because it's easier. I know guys who are intelligent, capable engineers who buy Macs because "it just comes with everything they need, and it just works." I'm not really convinced they're in the wrong, either.

I ran windows for a long time and got sick of the crappy OS and security so poor 50% of the CPU power is dedicated to preventing me from getting hacked.

Then I ran Ubuntu for a few years. This time I got tired of the completely crappy/inconsistent interfaces, and having to spend way too much of my time being a sysadmin.

Now I've got a Mac. It's nicely designed, I don't have to mess with it, and I've got a Unix-variant at my fingertips when I'm feeling that command-line itch. I still have to deal with lack of software due to Windows dominance, but I'm learning to live without some stuff.

All of this is on my home machine. At work where I need the real thing it's vterms to a Unix box, baby.

Having said that, I did this because it was MY CHOICE. I didn't hand control over to anyone. I can install just about any software I care to on this machine and Steve Jobs is not going to show up with a baseball bat. OSS paranoia about the big bad corporations coming to steal your compilers doesn't help anything.

I can install just about any software I care to on this machine and Steve Jobs is not going to show up with a baseball bat.

Not yet. However, if a critical mass of people are willing to accept the locked down iOS model for their laptop/desktop machines as well, then there you go. It is not paranoia. It is simply a matter of acknowledging that in free markets, businesses target the "average person".

More FUD. Apple is developing a delivery platform for applications. If you don't like it open firefox and google for "python ide mac os x" or whatever you're looking for. They're not going to force you to use the app store. That's retarded and you're retarded for thinking it.

So, you're saying they should have bought a Windows machine? Your exclusion of mentioning Windows implies that. By the way, a default Mac comes with more FOSS software installed than a Windows box ever will. But good troll anyway.

Not the government. Just governments. All of them. The US has the advantage of a head start, but I imagine in fifty years every government in the world will have their own different policies on how they want to manage those parts of the internet that fall within their physical borders. And somewhere will be an army of network administrators getting very angry because people in the US want to watch porn from servers in Africa, and the government in Egypt just announced it will block any traffic from servers